Collapses and dark ages also create conditions for meaning drift. Meaning drift is a random change in the frequency of a meaning due to the small population among which this meaning is common. Meaning drift results in a small number of meanings being distributed among a disproportionately large number of people. After their dark ages, the Greeks did not return to Linear B script but adopted the Phoenician alphabet (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 147-8).

Collapses break down the dead ends of cultural evolution and open up paths to meanings that allow for more efficient adaptation. The division of activity, order and active power enables the creation of new counterfacts. The traditional choice between counterfacts, in turn, increases the variety of men and meanings, albeit slowly:

“It is, then, not simply more men, but more different men, which brings an increase in productivity. Men have become powerful because they have become so different: new possibilities of specialization depending not so much on any increase in individual intelligence but on growing differentiation of individuals—provide the basis for a more successful use of the earth’s resources” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, pp. 122-3).

The evolution of meanings accelerated due to the accumulation of cultural experience and the expansion of the set of counterfacts on the basis of which the traditional choice was made. Traditional society and order became more complex. As socio-cultural development progressed, the multiplicity and mass of activities required for the reproduction of culture-society gradually exceeded the multiplicity and mass of activities required for the reproduction of individuals. In other words, the complexity of the culture-society increasingly surpassed the complexity of its individuals. Since the mass of added activity exceeded the mass of necessary activity, a difference arose between them—surplus activity and surplus product.

“If the laborer wants all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his race, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of productiveness in his labor, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous time, no surplus labor and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 512).

The entire product is made in production, but its division into necessary and surplus products occurs in circulation, in the relations of gift-giving, redistribution and commodity exchange. This means that the growth of surplus activity and surplus product is linked not only to the division of activity and active power, but also to the division of order: chiefdoms and states based on voluntary and forced tributes evolved as they “learned” to increase and extract the surplus product:

“The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft. … The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is ‘consumed’ in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed” (Scott 2017, pp. 171-2).

The ratio between surplus and necessary activity (and their products) forms the rate of surplus activity. The more the complexity of the culture-society exceeds the complexity of the individuals, the higher the rate of surplus activity.

Since, as we have seen above, Marx did not yet know and could not know that complex labor cannot in principle be reduced to simple labor, he could not have known either that added activity cannot be reduced to necessary activity. If for Marx surplus labor and surplus product were produced by the workers and other exploited classes, and appropriated by the exploiting classes, then from our point of view the surplus activity and its products are produced by culture-society as a whole, and the manner of their appropriation depends on the relative political, economic and cultural* power (or authority) of the state, social categories and individuals.

As long as the surplus product was redistributed for the benefit of officials and the army, states were satisfied with a vertical, i.e. centralized, calculation and accounting. The growth of crafts and cities led to a horizontal, i.e. decentralized, circulation of the surplus product. Surplus activity and the need to put its product into circulation were the driving force behind the long process of value and money development. Money spread where the surplus product was extracted from the immediate producers and transferred to an indefinite number of people through the mechanisms of competitive circulation.

The multiplication of meanings implies a specialization of subjects (artisans, officials, priests, etc.) and an increase in the complexity of their active power—experience and personality. New types of norms arise that regulate communication; human relationships are increasingly mediated by meanings and turn into relations of social roles. When the subjective side of activity is mediated and becomes an abstraction, the objective side also becomes an abstraction: things as means of activity become rights and duties. With the further division of the socio-cultural order, possession develops as a right of disposal, which is associated with the obligation to use. Possession complements and replaces application. If application is the disposal of a thing in the process of use, then possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. This applies to both private and community possession.

The quantity of cultural bits contained in the subject and in the means of activity constitutes their meaning mass. The composition of meaning is the ratio between the mass of meanings contained in the subject (actor) and the mass of meanings contained in the means of activity. The mass of meanings in the activity itself depends on this ratio. The lower the meaning composition, the more complex the subject in relation to the means of activity, the smaller the mass of meanings in the means of activity relative to the mass of meanings in the subject—for example, if a skilled worker uses simple tools. And vica versa, the more complex the means of activity in relation to the subject, the greater the mass of cultural bits in things in relation to that in people, the higher the composition of meaning.